The Socialist Sarajevo: between heritage and modernity

Abstract

In the early 1960s Sarajevo experienced an exponential growth and an economic and demographic boom that exceeded the availability of housing. To remedy this growth peripheral areas were occupied by newly built districts which among other things reflected the gigantism of the socialist period, and proposed a system made up of blocks and super-blocks scattered in open territories. The architectural panorama was enriched by a series of new architectural editions, expressly inspired by the principles of functionalism and rationalism of the Bauhaus. All this has been created on the foundations made by a group of architects who returned in Bosnia Herzegovina after they had been trained in the most important European schools of architecture. Work of the new generations of Yugoslav architects marked a shift at the architectural scene in the 1960s. The paper intends to retrace some of the main stages of “modernization” of Sarajevo and highlight the singularity of architectural production that is, internationally, still unknown. © 2023 Festival Architettura Edizioni. All rights reserved.